Comment by eli_gottlieb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eli_gottlieb | Hacker News Reader

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>"Seat allocation" doesn't favor rural districts,

Yes it does, at least in the sense that "rural" means "low population density" or "low ratio of population to Congressional seats".

>[T]he Senate may be the least democratic legislative chamber in any developed nation.

>In the last few years, 41 senators representing as little as a third of the nation’s population have frequently blocked legislation, as the filibuster (or the threat of it) has become a routine part of Senate business.

>In this country, the ratio between Wyoming’s representation and California’s is 66 to 1.

This means that if you are a software or computer engineer living in California, as is the norm here on Hacker News, you have 1/66 the Senatorial voting power as anyone at all who happens to live in Wyoming.

>This pattern has policy consequences, notably ones concerning the environment. “Nations with malapportioned political systems have lower gasoline taxes (and lower pump prices) than nations with more equitable representation of urban constituencies,” two political scientists, J. Lawrence Broz and Daniel Maliniak, wrote in a recent study. Such countries also took longer to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, if they ratified it at all. These differences were, they wrote, a consequence of the fact that “rural voters in industrialized countries rely more heavily on fossil fuels than urban voters.”

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/03/11/us/politics/de...

Emphases mine. But please, explain to me why the voting majority should be consistently denied implementation of their ideas just to cater to people who happen to live where there aren't many other people? That's before we consider the influence of money on elections.

To not understand the Senate representational system is to not understand that the explicit purpose of the Senate was to prevent the tyranny of the majority. That was the foundation of the U.S. Constitution. The Great Compromise of 1787 was expressway to ensure smaller states had their rights protected. Without that compromise, tax dollars could be voted to improve New York City while draining the economy of less populous states. That's the genius of the American system. It is the very definition of a check and balance. The States are sovereign entities and deserve an equal voice. The House of Represenatives provides representation based on population, so that does ensure that every person is represented equally, while the Senate technically represents the states, which ensures that each state is represented equally. The foolish amendment that enabled the direct election of Senators somewhat diluted that dichotomy, but ultimately the Senate represents the states.

What's truly foolish is believing that not only is disproportionate representation somehow democratic but then arguing that it's preferable to leave the choice of that disproportionate representative up to those who already wield power.

Great, so instead of tyranny of the majority, we have tyranny of the minority.

Checks and balances. Wyoming has 1 representative in the house, California has 53. When you combine the house and the senate, it should (in theory) be much harder for a bill to pass without approval of both the majority of the states and the majority of the population.

Theory is nothing without evidence, and in lived experience, not only do bills completely fail to pass due to overuse of the Senate filibuster, but the House itself is now so thoroughly gerrymandered as to not even represent the majority of the population -- since most House elections are not, statistically speaking, contested at all.

The senate represents the states and the house represents the people. It would be entirely unfair if a small number of high population states could easily impose their will on a large number of small population states. States and their citizens gave up some of their sovereignty when they joined the union, and in return were promised some equitable form of representation, no matter the size of their population. Large states like Colorado bring massive amounts of land an natural resources to the union.

There's a reason we're a constitutional republic and not a pure democracy. Pure democracy would inevitably lead to a tyranny of the majority. Nine US states have over half the US population. Would it be fair for those few states to able to completely over-ride the interests of the other 41 states in the union?

>It would be entirely unfair if a small number of high population states could easily impose their will on a large number of small population states.

Why? "States" are arbitrary lines drawn in the soil. Should everyone who wants more power just secede and form their own state, ad absurdum?

Besides which, none of the actually existing countries with proportional-representation democracy have sent their rural regions to hell in a handbasket. You can't keep using a thought experiment as a reason to consider catastrophic outcomes from non-regionalist democracy plausible when the empirical evidence runs against it.

And, just to finish off, there's the issue that the current "states" don't even make sense as regional divisions. The citizens of rural upstate New York have far more in common with Vermonters, Western Massachussans, and even citizens of rural Pennsylvania and Illinois than they do with citizens of New York City. Yet because of the division into states, the interests of rural New Yorkers are neglected relative to those of Vermonters just because rural New Yorkers live on the same side of the completely arbitrary border as urban New Yorkers -- even tangential and immaterial association with cities is penalized under this system!

>Would it be fair for those few states to able to completely over-ride the interests of the other 41 states in the union?

This presumes that those nine states have completely unanimous elections. It is entirely fair that elections should be fought over the issues that matter to the largest portion of the people possible, that politicians should stand for election by putting forward the most appealing rational positions, rather than by catering to a disproportionately represented minority and deliberately neglecting the majority of citizens.

Despite the constant fear-mongering of antidemocratic political philosophers, majoritarian democracy, with the rule of law enforced, has never actually resulted in the predicted rounds of war, death, famine, and pestilence. To oppose democratic rule based on violent-mob rule being a bad thing is disingenuous.

State borders are not any more arbitrary than the border between Canada and the US. In the US, "States" are sovereign states that gave up some limited amount of sovereignty to join the Union. They are not simply administrative divisions like in other countries. The Constitution established a limited role for the federal government of the United States and reserved all other powers to the individual states.

It may seem like a historical relic now, but each state joined the union under the premise (and likely binding law/treaty) of retaining some sovereignty. Each state has it's own laws, courts, police, military, etc. It's a feature, not a bug, that rural states can prevent the cities from imposing a tyranny of the majority on them at a federal level via the senate. Just as the house of representatives based on population can prevent a bunch of rural states from imposing their will on the high population ones.

Take for instance Nevada. If the majority of the population of Nevada wants legal gambling, they should be able to have it. A pure federal democracy would allow 9 states to make a law banning gambling nation wide. That's far less likely to happen in the current system as low population states have reason to band together and prevent any federal over riding of the freedom of their state's citizens to self govern.

> In the US, "States" are sovereign states that gave up some limited amount of sovereignty to join the Union.

That's true of some of the states, such as the original 13 and Texas, but it's not true of most of them. Most states never had any form of sovereignty and were just arbitrarily created divisions of territory.

>Just as the house of representatives based on population can prevent a bunch of rural states from imposing their will on the high population ones.

Which it completely fails to do.

In terms of the Kyoto Protocol, are we still buying into the myth that global warming is caused by human carbon emissions? Have the last 17 years disproved that yet?

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